About Me

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No Fixed Abode, Home Counties, United Kingdom
I’m a 60-year-old Aspergic gardening CAD-Monkey. Sardonic, cynical and with the political leanings of a social reformer, I’m also a toy and model figure collector, particularly interested in the history of plastics and plastic toys. Other interests are history, current affairs, modern art, and architecture, gardening and natural history. I love plain chocolate, fireworks and trees, but I don’t hug them, I do hug kittens. I hate ignorance, when it can be avoided, so I hate the 'educational' establishment and pity the millions they’ve failed with teaching-to-test and rote 'learning' and I hate the short-sighted stupidity of the entire ruling/industrial elite, with their planet destroying fascism and added “buy-one-get-one-free”. Likewise, I also have no time for fools and little time for the false crap we're all supposed to pretend we haven't noticed, or the games we're supposed to play. I will 'bite the hand that feeds', to remind it why it feeds.

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

W is for The Works (rant alert at the end)

I know someone else Blogged the 'Henge' the other night but in my defence I've been covering The Works and the little treats they bring us for over a year or two now and the amount of stuff useful to figure collectors they have right now is worth a whole post in itself.

Apart from the items below and The Boys Book of Arthur Ward...sorry 'Airfix'...(it's the spine you know!), they also have plenty of the Clash of Heros figures I blogged the other day (I'm picking one up every time I pass and will give them a separate post when I have a few more). Also if you remember the Woodie key-ring figure from Toy Story I got in the Pound Shop the other day - well The Works have the whole set, along with several Disney princess/fairy types, some Winnie the Pooh characters and other Disney key-rings.

So to Stonehenge, it's small and mine had two part 6's (or part 9's? it's hard to tell as they are placed next to each other on the display and read 'each-other' upside-down...does that make any sense?!), you can see the second one jammed into the larger orifice top right, this - of course - may be why it's been remaindered in the first place!

But it's not TOO small, and buying two sets will enable you to fill in the printed blanks with the spares, or make a more ordered one contemporaneous with Caesar's march across the South of England. It's £1.99 for Christ's sake...get three! There are no instructions but you don't need them as the blanks are numbered on the little puzzle-base and the 'polystone' poly-stones are also numbered, just the problem of how to deal with the two number 6/9's!

They are in the kids book section and the box is surprisingly small...

July 2015  - I bough a second one a few days later and it had different stones for No.'s 6/9, the reason there's space around the one above, some packer had miss-placed a duplicate!

The Works are also clearing the Tron Legacy stuff, most of which is as cack as the film was reported to be - I read as many reviews as I can and aggregate the result to decide whether to see a film these days and the message on this one was don't bother if you are remotely fond of the original!

Most of the the toys are silly little micro-scale flying things which bare no resemblance to the film I knew and loved and there is a second range of 4 or 5" action figures, you can tell how much time I gave them as I don't know what size they were!

But...the 'Light -cycles' are about 54mm and one (Flynn's - the white one) is very reminiscent of the original film, so I have tracked down 3 of 4 and will get the other as soon as I see it. Of interest is the pricing...Fleet - affluent London commuter dormitory...£2.99, Newbury - Rural market town with local authority overspill from Reading and the unpaid gardeners of baronets...£1.99!

Above are two of the Light-cycles from Tron, below is the booklet from the Stonehenge boxed-set and a remaindered book by James May, his is down to £1.99 from £9.99 or a four-fifths reduction, Arthur Ward's was £6.99 from £19.99 or approximately two-thirds, from this unscientific evidence we can deduce that James' book is the cackier one, and having read them both I can concur...by a long shot.

This is one of two of his titles in The Works at the moment, can I suggest he sticks to whittering-on about cars instead of giveing Hornby/Scalextric/Airfix/Humbrol Ltd.Inc.Co.Corp.Int. another three hours of free advertising on the Licence-fee payer! Bloody BBC...

It seems that eventually everything comes to The Works...all you have to do is wait (they have Airfix Spitfire kits with paint as well at the moment!), with the Hemlock & Wendel (or whatever they are called - Wynndot & Bendall?) Olympic mascot key-rings currently announced at 7 quid each and the Works' Disney ones at about a pound I wouldn't mind betting they'll have the Jemmy & Kendal key-rings for the same price in 18 months time, buckets of'em!

Right - that's Disney, the Olypics, the BBC, our biggest native toy company and James May whinged about in one rant...a fine nights work me-thinks!

6 comments:

Gog said...

Hi Hugh,
This comment is not strictly related to what you wrote, but since you bought that Stonehenge kit, you might be interested in this nice stone sets I recently discovered. Stonehenge is also available (in section "historical buildings").

Well, that's all, in case you want to build a diorama sometime.

Important notice: they don't cost 1,99 pounds :)

cheers!

Hugh Walter said...

Thanks Gog, but...I think you might have forgotten a link there somewhere? What stones?!!

Cheers Hugh!

Gog said...

oh, this head of mine!

http://www.aedesars.com/construction-kits

Hugh Walter said...

Ah! That's better and very interesting as this is the company that supplied Del Prado for the 'Build Your Own Castle' part work a couple of few years ago which had a wooden kit of a wagon I've covered here somewhere.

I bought the first few issues to get the wagon and a selection of the little stones (which seem to be dyed plaster-of-paris) and have used them for small walls and things one of which used to be on the Imageshack pages, I must transfer all that stuff here...

Thanks for the link, I'll add it to the page next time I'm updating the links - at the moment I'm fighting with the tag list!

Hugh

Gog said...

Ok, glad you found it interesting. I never saw any of these sets, just a catalogue a friend brought me from the Spielemesse in Nüremberg. They're amazing!

Hugh Walter said...

They are very good - they're not in scale but they 'look the part' as it were. If I recall correctly - the part-work one had wooden frames not card (as they appear on the website), but I may be getting the memory of the frames confused with the little fret that the wagon came as?

And for war-gaming they make excellent ruins, walls etc...

H